Use of tomography to estimate the representative elementary volume in mortars stained with potassium iodide

Publication date: 5 June 2018
Source:Materials & Design, Volume 147
Author(s): Dong Cui, Wei Sun, Qiannan Wang, Chunping Gu
The representative volume element (RVE) plays an important role in the mechanics and physics of random heterogeneous materials with a view to predicting their effective properties. Estimating the RVE size, therefore, is of high importance. In this paper, potassium iodide (KI) was applied first time as the staining agent, and local sand fraction of mortar was calculated combining staining technique and computed tomography (CT). Besides, an extended attenuation method was refined in this study, and spatial distribution of local porosity for mortars was obtained. The RVE size was estimated depending on gray-scale value, local sand fraction and local porosity, respectively, and the results reveal that, the RVE size depending on gray-scale value is smaller than that depending on local porosity or depending on local sand volume fraction; besides, both the RVE sizes depending on local sand fraction and depending on local porosity comply with that obtained from numerical modelling, where a RVE size is suggested to be 3–5 times greater than the maximum sand size.

Graphical abstract

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